1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical fiber which can compensate for dispersion, a dispersion compensator, and an optical transmission system including the dispersion compensator.
2. Related Background Art
Conventionally, dispersion compensators for compensating for chromatic dispersion of signal light occurring in optical fiber transmission lines have a typical housing size of 230 mm×230 mm×40 mm, thus occupying a very large volume in optical transmission systems. This results from the fact that it is necessary for main line long-haul, large-volume transmission systems to compensate for large chromatic dispersion, whereby a dispersion-compensating optical fiber employed for a dispersion compensator may have a length of ten-odd kilometers, whereas it is also important to control the dispersion slope for compensating for chromatic dispersion over a wide band, and so forth. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. HEI 10-123342 uses a dispersion-compensating optical fiber having a chromatic dispersion of −100 ps/nm/km as a characteristic at a wavelength of 1.55 μm.